Hey
Was just wondering if you have any tips or advice for analysing an aural text. We have an assessment tomorrow where we only hear it twice and I'm nervous i will not be able to get enough techniques out of it for the exam the next day...
Any help is appreciated 
Hey there! Are you allowed to write in both listenings?
A student asked this about her listening task recently, and this is the advice I gave about poems:
-Know the content of the poems well. What are the themes being treated in each? This is important to know because each speaker may present the themes differently: one could speak of Yeats' ageing poems as an elegy to youth, whereas another speaker could be using his or her voice to suggest the beauty of the ageing process. So knowing the themes of each will be an important link to the tone of the speaker's voices.
-Study some words for vocal techniques. Tone, diction, and pace are easy places to start. Volume, even! If the speaker clearly gets softer in one section, they could be expressing a mourning, or concealing content. Take note of upwards or downward inflictions in your everyday conversations leading up to the exam. Typically, females use upwards inflictions more, just a warning. So, notice how when we ask a question we usually end the last word, or the last syllable, at a higher pitch than the other words in the sentence? Think of a small child saying, "Can I have some ice cream...pleaaaaase?" If you're imagining it as I hope you are, you'll hear a little upwards infliction at the end. If someone is stating something, they're more likely to use a downwards or monotone infliction. If someone is questioning something, or playfully toying with an idea, they'll likely use upwards inflictions. So if you can pay close attention to the way we speak using inflictions at the end, it could come in handy when you're listening to your speakers. Also, there's a stark difference between someone speaking monotone and someone using their voice to mirror the lulls of wording. Perhaps if we are looking at a poem like Leda and the Swan, someone speaking forcefully and using their volume to add to the crescendo of the violence, we could feel a passion from the speaker. But if someone speaks of Leda and the Swan softly, and perhaps quietly and smoothly, they could be interpreting the poem as a eulogy.
So, good words to use: tone, monotone, inflictions, volume, pitch, diction. If you can have a look at the rhyming scheme of each poem too and commit that to memory, then perhaps you could use that to your advantage too. Is the speaker leaning in to the rhyming scheme and playing along joyfully, or are they using their tone to suppress the rhyming.
Although this is for poetry, it should help with whatever your texts are. Jot down things messily (but so that you can read it!) and even shorten things (write met instead of metaphor) to prompt you when you read your notes later. You could commit the first listening to jotting down the words, and the second listening to analysing, or you could just listen the first time and not write, and then the second time you could write like crazy, knowing when important things are going to come up!
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Topic: Analysing Aural Texts (Read 1792 times)